[Gentoo] Trying to get a Canon SD500 camera working

I had some Costco gift cards to use, and my digital camera’s been slowly dying for a year (even faster since getting soaked by the ocean in Hawaii). So I bought a new Canon SD500, a nice 7MP camera. I found a couple of docs saying it works in Linux. Problem is, I just can’t get it working.

First, it wasn’t even recognized as the user but was as root (found using `lsusb`), so I figured it was some sort of permissions problem. I came across a post from some guy named Steve suggesting that hotplug was the problem. After looking into it further, I found a file ‘/etc/hotplug/usb/usbcam’ that defines a group required to access hotplugged USB things. In Gentoo, this group is called “plugdev” — never heard of it in my life, never seen it in any documentation, nothing. You’d expect that it might be the “usb” group, but no, it’s something with a weird name nobody’s ever heard of.

Next, the camera was found in f-spot (added to portage today) and gthumb, but I still can’t get photos to import because other errors are coming up. The camera won’t respond to repeated identifier sequences, or it isn’t recognized, or something else.